John L. Pollock

Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona.

B.A. physics, philosophy, mathematics, University of Minnesota.

PhD. philosophy, University of California, Berkeley.

 

Mountain biker extraordinaire. Follow this link to information about mountain biking in Southern Arizona.

The OSCAR Project

John Pollock directs the OSCAR Project, funded in part by the National Science Foundation. The goal of the OSCAR Project is the formulation of a general theory of rationality and its implementation in an artificial rational agent. The project is predicated on the view that philosophy has an essential role to play in artificial intelligence. The function of artificial agents is to draw conclusions and make decisions on the basis of information supplied to them. But we do not want them to draw just any old conclusions or make just any old decisions. We want them to draw rational conclusions and make rational decisions. We can make a limited amount of progress in the task of building such an agent by relying upon our untutored intuitions about what is rational. But to build a general purpose rational agent, we need a general account of how the agent is to behave -- a theory of rationality. The construction and implementation of such a theory is the objective of the OSCAR Project.

OSCAR is a fully implemented architecture for rational agents, based upon a general purpose defeasible reasoner. The defeasible reasoner is the world's first such reasoner capable of operating in a rich logical environment like first-order logic in which logical consistency is not decidable. The theory underlying OSCAR is described in Cognitive Carpentry (Bradford/MIT Press, 1995). Click here for an overview of OSCAR, along with links allowing the current version of OSCAR to be downloaded, along with The OSCAR Manual. The latter details the construction of OSCAR, and explains its application to particular reasoning problems.



John Pollock is associated with the University of Arizona's program in Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence is treated as an interdisciplinary subject at the University of Arizona. AI research is carried out in nine different departments, and most of these departments offer AI-related courses. These courses collectively cover almost all of the subfields of AI, including artificial agents, automated deduction, expert systems, game theory, language processing, machine learning, machine vision, neural nets, nonmonotonic logic, planning, and robotics. The associated departments include Computer Science, Communication, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Library Science, Linguistics, Management Information Systems, Philosophy, Psychology, and Systems and Industrial Engineering.



Fall 2001, teaching Phil202, Introduction to Symbolic Logic.

Spring 2002, teaching Phil 455/555, Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence. The course is a general introduction to AI, designed around the project of constructing a rational agent.


Areas of Interest

Publications

Contact Information
Office:
Social Science 127
Phone Number:
(520) 621-3120 (Office)
Postal address:
Department of Philosophy
PO Box 210027
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
USA
[email protected]